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Saturday, August 30, 2014

Weekly VLOG #5 (14/08-21/08): On being alone and first food shopping!

Another week has passed and I am still in Iceland. We had a lovely weekend where we got to see some fun things (and I got to film some fun things for My Year in Iceland). However, on Monday my dearest boyfriend left. It was quite odd to be on myself when I haven't had to be on myself for so long, it didn't help that Skype wasn't working well and there was only minimal communication between us.

Doing things by myself was quite odd and I won't lie and say I wasn't feeling horribly lonely, because the truth is that during this week I felt lonely. But time won't stop just because you aren't feeling the greatest so I had to shake it off and start doing things.

I went food shopping and that was such a huge culture shock! Not only was I having hard time finding where the food was located in the store but I as well was just shocked by the quality of the food and the store. In Geneva I always shopped at Migros since they had the lowest prices and were closest to where I lived. So in Iceland that store for me is Bónus. However, Bónus is so dirty and unorganized that I wasn't even sure if they still were actually selling food for human consumption! As I was walking through the store scolding myself for being such a snob and not appreciative of the fact that there was at least a grocery store in a walking distance from campus I managed to pick up some food for me to eat. So I would say that the grocery trip was somewhat a success.

I feel that a big part of my week was just me wandering around trying to find things. I have never lived in this part of Reykjavík before so I don't really know where things are. One of those things were a pharmacy, I walked what seemed to be a lifetime just to pinpoint down a local pharmacy that I had found online only to see that they were under renovation and of course they didn't mention that on their webpage. The other one was the bank, but I found that one quickly and was blessed with great service.

And talking about good service, I have been happily surprised with how great service I have been having here. Iceland is frequently known for bad service and I would in the past agree with that, however, I have been getting marvelous service this time around! People are actually polite and acknowledge the fact someone has entered the store. The only place where I have gotten repeatedly bad service is Hagkaup, which is both strange and not so strange. Hagkaup is supposed to be a better quality food type of store but at the same time it is mostly a facade of just upping their prices and pretending to be better and that is visible by their horrible service and quite rude staff.

And that is all for this week, and below is the super short vlog since I haven't really gotten in the habit of vlogging.